Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: A conversational back-and-forth with a friend reminded me of the following, from Fitzgerald's "One Hundred False Starts"*:

"Once, not so long ago when my work was hampered by so many false starts that I thought the game was up at last, and when my personal life was even more thoroughly obfuscated, I asked an old Alabama negro:

'Uncle Bob, when things get so bad there isn't any way out, what do you do then?'

The heat from the kitchen stove stirred his white sideburns as he warmed himself. If I cynically expected a platitudinous answer, a reflection of something remembered from Uncle Remus, I was disappointed.

'Mr. Fitzgerald,' he said, 'when things get thataway I wuks.'

It was good advice: work is almost everything. But it would be nice to be able to distinguish useful work from mere labor expended. Perhaps that is part of work itself--to find the difference. Perhaps my frequent solitary sprints around the track are profitable..."

*There are five or six of the essays in the Cambridge volume My Lost City that strike me as almost perfect ("What I Think and Feel at 25," "'Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!'" (though he's mostly wrong in this one), "How to Waste Material," "One Hundred False Starts," and some combination of "The Crack Up," "Pasting It Together" and "Handle With Care"), thus they keep on reappearing